Twenty One Pilots

Twenty One Pilots is a band that consists of two members, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun. They have ranged in popularity over the last 10 or so years. I want to know their highs and lows. Also, I want to know their genre or emotion.I have listened to the band Twenty One Pilots for about 8 years of my life. Yet, when someone asks me what genre they are I am not sure. They’re punk rock, but also pop, but also rap, but also techno, but also something else entirely. My goal in this assignment and the surrounding project is to use lyrical analysis, and other data supplied by Genius lyrics to quantify what genre(s) they are. Presumably, some of their songs will fall into one genre or another. So then, I will use the rest of the data to see which of their genres is the most popular or more appealing to different types of listeners.

Another important question that I want to answer has to do with whether Twenty One Pilots is a generally happy band or a generally sad band. I will use the same lyrical analysis to aid in answering this question as well.

Why Genius Lyrics?

I chose to scrape data from Genius lyrics because I love music. The Spotify API is a great tool for getting data on different artists and songs, but there are a few additional columns of data that Spotify doesn’t give you. This is where Genius Lyrics comes in. By scraping this website you can get the data that Spotify doesn’t provide such as the lyrics of the song, its producer, and oftentimes, a description of the song. In order to get the extra data, I scraped the Genius lyrics page for each individual Twenty One Pilots song.

Views by Release Date

As I said above, this band has had some high highs, but also some low lows. I’m going to use a time series of the number of views their genius lyrics pages had since they started releasing music to measure their popularity.

This graph has some spikes that indicate when each album came out with the biggest spike coming from their album Blurryface. Next, let’s cross reference this graph with another graph showing the views for each album.

Views by Album

Another reason to look at views by album is because the different albums have different genres associated with them. So, let’s see what album has the most views:

As you can see, the album with the most views is Blurryface which has many of the most popular songs they have released including “Stressed Out” and “Ride”. That is one of their more Pop centered albums. This makes sense considering that Pop was the most popular genre when that album came out. There are also other genres of songs on that album, but presumably they didn’t fair as well in the public eye.

As expected “Stressed Out” and “Ride” are at the top of the list. The surprise is “Tear in My Heart” and “Heavydirtysoul”. Both of these songs definitely fall more into the modern rock genre, but have relatively high views. This shows that even when Twenty One Pilots is writing genres other than Pop they can still be received well.

Lyrics

Lyrics are one of the two most important parts of determining if a song is happy or not. The other being the actual music and key of the song. Twenty One Pilots sometimes tiptoes this line by having sad lyrics laid over a upbeat, major-key song.So let’s see what some of their lyrics say about the emotions they elicit.

This graph shows that joy, anticipation, and trust are some of the key emotions that Twenty One Pilots tends to convey. While their more negative common words are often sad as well as negative.

Now, as fun as this graph is, it is not as useful as I would like. So, I am going to pick a couple of specific songs (Not Today, Ride, Pantaloon, Kitchen Sink) that I know are very upbeat and we’ll see if the lyrics of those songs reflect the positivity or negativity that they are meant to convey.

Clearly, there are many more negative words than positive words in these songs. This is interesting because most songs in major key are considered happy songs. This goes to show that besides just having many different genres within their music, they even break traditional genres by mixing happy beats with not-so-happy lyrics.

Combining With Spotify API

Spotify has its own algorithm for computing how happy a song is. They call it valence. So, let’s compare their valence value with the emotional analysis we just did. I’m going to add up the valence of the same four major key songs that we did previously and compare that to four other minor key songs (Redecorate, Tear in My Heart, Ode to Sleep, and Glowing Eyes)

If you look at this graph and the previous you can obviously see the difference. Also, now that you know what valence is you can look at the valence value assigned by Spotify for each set of four songs and see how they are generally aligned with the graphs. This suggests that Spotify’s algorithm weighs lyrics more than the actual key of the song.

But Who Cares if I Can’t Dance

Happy music, sad music, sentiment analysis, who cares? I really just want to know what album I can turn on when I want to dance around the kitchen.

This is actually surprising. As I said earlier, Blurryface is the most popular album and has the most Pop songs on it. Usually Pop songs get high danceability scores, so the fact that Trench, a mostly Modern Rock album, has higher danceability is very interesting. It just goes to show that Twenty One Pilots is anything but predictable, even for a long time fan.

Important Information

After all of this analysis, I’m sure you want to start listening to Twenty One Pilots. Well here’s a graph of how long each album is so that you can use this and the graph of album views to decide where you want to start.

I would recommend starting with one of the most recent three, Blurryface, Trench, or Scaled And Icy. Hope you Enjoy!